At the high school track today I watched young runners doing skip-and-swing warm-up drills. For a moment I thought I was back in the 1950s. Then I remembered. They were doing "dynamic stretching," the latest scientifically approved prerequisite for an effective training session.
Things change, and happily that can include the things you were supposed to do but didn't enjoy. Like static stretching. In my elite days in the 1980s, every runner before a race was propped at a 45-degree angle against a tree or wall or someone else's car. "Trying to push it over?" the passing public would inquire jovially, as you leaned, one calf extended back behind, pressing, creaking, silently counting. "No stretch less than 45 seconds is effective," was the mantra. The stretch had to be lo-oo-oo-ng. Impatient to race, I thought about Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid drawing his six-gun, when he pleaded, "Can I move now?"
And sure enough, movement is back. Coaching best practice has dumped those long static stretches, and brought in (or back) "dynamic drills" — skips, leg swings, lunge twists, butt kicks, reach-for-the-sky extensions. My ex-Army high school physical education teacher had us doing those half a century ago. Things come around. But not everything.
The long road of running history is littered with reject training beliefs. They lie scattered along the centuries like dry discarded sponges. The ancient Greeks advocated surgically removing the athlete's spleen. They believed the essence of training was to balance the four humors of the body — hot, cold, wet, dry. A rigid four-day training cycle became high fashion with later Greek coaches. Running footmen in the 1600s practiced in "shoes made of lead." Captain Barclay, the great athlete-coach of the early 1800s, began every program with extreme "purging and sweating," which were as unpleasant as they sound, and remained standard practice for 100 years. In the 1870s Walter George's record-breaking career popularized his "Hundred-Up" formula of on-the-spot knee-lifts. A century later runners equally religiously totaled Arthur Lydiard's 100 miles a week. Around 1900, the secret was massage. "Every aspect of training is inferior to massage," preached top British coach Harry Andrews, who used his own liniment concoctions and rubbing techniques. One of his disciples was known for his severity as Jack the Rubber. Tired marathon runners in that era were revived with strychnine, champagne and rubbing. Andrews once poured champagne over a faltering runner's head.
From the beginnings of the modern sport to the middle 20th century, long-distance racing was believed to depend on activating a mysterious phenomenon called "the second wind." You find it seriously analyzed in coaching books as late as the 1940s, and it dominated decades of schoolboy running fiction. Only the jolly decent hero found his second wind, and consequently won the race. The explanation can only be that they started much too fast, hit oxygen debt, slowed right down and recovered.
Will any of these obsolete ideas return in some form, as dynamic stretching has returned? What can we learn from them? What does the whole process imply? It's easy to laugh at the past, but how skeptically should we listen to the orthodoxies that our own coaches and runners obediently follow?
Most such errors of the past derived from deep human attitudes toward the whole business of competitive running. For simplicity, I will label them fear, punishment, system and beauty.
FEAR
Distance running was long feared as dangerous. Incidents like the collapse of Dorando Pietri in the 1908 Olympics merely confirmed popular prejudice. Every coaching book warned direly that too much running will "make you go stale" (as if runners are made of cheese). Roger Bannister still believed that as late as the 1950s.
Even more dire was the long-held fear that running "damages the health." The Victorian novel Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (1870) describes how a fine athlete "goes stale," with a "slow, heavy pulse." When he collapses in a race, a surgeon pronounces, "He will never recover. It's a breakdown in his health." The same superstitious fear prompted the London doctor who examined Pietri to announce (ludicrously) that his heart was "displaced by half an inch." The next year, the New York Times warned that "to take part in a Marathon race is to risk serious and permanent injury to health, with immediate death a danger not very remote." Even James E. Sullivan, leader of the American sport in the early 1900s, dictated in his book that "no father should permit his son to compete in a long-distance race unless he is nineteen years old, and then only after having had a medical examination."
The best coaching book of the early 20th century, Athletics by F.A.M. Webster (1925), works hard to reassure parents who "fear that a youngster may shorten his life by developing that mysterious condition known as 'athlete's heart.'" In my own youth, I was still often told too much running would "strain your heart."
That fear probably came from two sources. One was the public distress often suffered near the finish by athletes who we now know were woefully undertrained. The other was that one effect of even modest training is a slowing of the pulse rate, which was regarded as dangerous. Webster was ahead of his time in describing the benefits of a slow pulse, and it was years before the causes and effects were widely understood. (Runners still encounter doctors who don't understand.)
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